SecretSchool.Org

MeanPC has reincarnated once again. This time I’ve decided to give MediaTemple’s GridServer a try. I’d heard about them before, and the idea intrigued me. Basically, you get 100GB of storage, 1TB of Bandwidth, and you can host up to 100 domains on one account. The price is only $20/month.
The basic premise of the “grid” is that all hosted sites reside on the grid, spread across possibly hundreds, or more, servers. Your site is not powered by an individual server, but resides on some sort of Beowulf/Raidlike cluster. It’s modular computing. According to Media Temple, any site is able to instantly respond to high usage spikes without a hiccup. It is also easy to add more gridserver packages to your account and scale your operation without having to move to bigger and better hosting.

The storage and bandwidth limitations seem ludicrous, but the limitation on your site by MediaTemple is actually in that you are assigned 1000 GPU’s (Grid Performance Units). This is some proprietary measure of the amount of CPU time your site requires. Most hoster/hostees know that the real limitation in the hosting business is how much work sites make the server’s CPU do, not storage and bandwidth. I’m not exactly sure how far 1000 GPU’s will get you, but from everything I’ve read, if I actually manage to hit 1000 GPU’s in a month, I’ll probably be glad to purchase more GPU’s due to the crazy traffic of my site.

Does this stuff actually work? I’m not sure yet. When I was researching, I found quite a few complaints about the performance of PHP/SQL driven sites like WordPress and Drupal. From later posts, it seems like MediaTemple has ironed out a lot of these kinks, and performance is much improved.

I bought my MediaTemple gridserver (gs) account two days ago. Account activation has been excruciatingly bad, but I presume I had a fairly unique problem with my account.

I created the account on Saturday around 4PM. I went to GoDaddy and plugged in the new DNS server info. Later that night, I tried to FTP into the account and was unable to. I figured the DNS was simply not resolving yet, so tried using the local URL, then the IP address to login. SmartFTP kept hanging up on the password authentication. I decided just to wait til the next day.

Sunday, at 12PM, I was still unable to FTP or SSH in to the account. I started a support ticket up. At 6PM, six hours later, I had heard nothing back, so I decided to call their support. After about 10 minutes on hold, I got a very friendly tech support guy. After deciding I was indeed doing everything right, and there was something wrong with the account, he informed me that he was escalating the incident up to level 2 support. Being 6PM on a Sunday, I was curious how soon this would get resolved, so I asked him “is level 2 support there right now?”. His answer was that “Level 2 support is always on call.” I took this to mean that, while level 2 support is always available, my $20 (gs) account was going to wait until the next morning. I am a fairly rational person, so that was cool with me. I did expect them to get to it first thing Monday morning though.

Monday, by 12PM, FTP and SSH were still non-functional and no updates had been made to by trouble ticket. I called MT again. After about 20 minutes on hold, I got another very nice tech. He went through the same routine, and said that we would indeed need a level 2 tech to fix the problem.
Me – “I see. That’s what they told me last night.”

Him -”Yes, I am going to re-escalate it, but this time with a higher priority.”
Me – “Can I talk to billing? I was expecting this to be done this morning. If I can’t get this resolved during this phone call, I think I’d rather just cancel the service and look for another option.”
Him -(still cool as a cucumber) “Hang on and let me see if I can get a level 2 tech on this right away. Give me 2 minutes.”

~2 minutes later
Him – “OK, I have level 2 working on your problem right now. I will email you within one hour with a status update, whether the problem has actually been fixed or not.”
Me – “That sounds reasonable, thanks.”

So, one hour later I check my email. Sure enough, the problem was resolved. There was some problem on their backend with password authentication syncing up with my account. Whatever that is, they fixed it.

So, I was fairly unimpressed with their support via the online system. The good news is that I got someone on the phone both times I called. The support guys were friendly even when I got a tad testy. Unfortunately, I had to light a fire under them to get the work done, but it did get done at that point.

I’m going to leave my overall impression for later, but we are off to a rocky start. I really hope it works out though.

Growth
MeanPC has been hosted at MediaTemple since January. In that time, traffic has grown exponentially. Although traffic is still relatively light by some standards, it is leaps and bounds above what is was in January-March. I went from getting 2 Google search hits per day in January to around 300 Google search hits per day this month.
So, how have the GridServer GPU’s scaled along with the increase in traffic? I was averaging 2-3 GPU’s per month in January and February. Now MeanPC is averaging 3 GPU’s per day. So, my traffic increase ten fold and still be within the bounds of the gs package. That would be a lot of traffic, and the ad revenue would easily cover upgrading the package at either MediaTemple, or going with a dedicated server solution.

The bottom line – I think 1,000 GPU’s/month is a good deal, so far. I can also tell you that WordPress seems to be a GPU hog, while Joomla seems to not use near the number of GPU’s for the same number of visitors. I moved the site to Joomla at the end of last month and immediately noticed a significant decrease in the amount of GPU’s consumed, even while traffic was still increasing.

Control Panel
I consider the control panel at MediaTemple to be one of it’s weaknesses. It is extremely slow to load. I have read at other sites that this is because all of the control panels are served up via HTTPS. The performance of the control panel is really horrid. Luckily, I don’t spend much time there.
The backup feature in MediaTemple’s gs package has been unavailable since I joined in January, and is still listed as Coming Soon. I’m not sure what soon is, but a backup feature would be very nice for my purposes.

The GPU usage monitor is oftentimes not working at all, and almost always very buggy. Currently my GPU meter is showing the daily GPU usage, but is not properly displaying the month to date GPU usage. It’s not a big deal, but it also shouldn’t be broken. In April, my GPU usage failed to update for about two weeks. A customer service request was promptly answered that they were “working on it”. MediaTemple eventually got it fixed. Again, not a big deal for me. If my site used a large percentage of the 1,000 GPU’s every month, this could be cause for concern though.

Uptime
Unfortunately, I have not been tracking site uptime. I have only encountered one network outage, and that was reported under their “known problems” and rectified within 15 minutes. Mediatemple seems to have excellent uptime, and proactive tech support. I will try and get some solid uptime numbers for the next installment. I will mention that it seems to be rare for just one site to go down. Typically, entire areas of the grid will go down at the same time because of the clustered architecture. This is actually good, because a higher priority is placed on getting the grid back up.

Installing software
There are only a few installers offered at MediaTemple, and I consider this to be a weakness. Mediatemple offers installers for WordPress, Drupal, and two E-commerce solutions: Magento and CubeCart. A pretty weak selection in my opinion. MediaTemple should at least offer a forum for install.

I did a Joomla! install at the end of last month. The install went fairly smoothly, although I have noticed that it is always tricky to do a manual install of a data-base driven web app at Media Temple. Most of these apps are setup to access the SQL server at localhost. MediaTemple is not setup this way. You have to find the database name in your control panel and enter it in manually. Installs at MediaTemple are always harder than they would be at another host, especially if said host offers Fantastico.

Having said that, MediaTemple is very good about offering support for server side apps like ImageMagick, GD, Mod-rewrite, etc. All of the Apache/PHP/SQL features you could possibly want are available.

Summary
Overall I am still satisfied with my grid server account. I have been with bad hosts such as Globat, 1&1, and a few other Cpanel oversellers. MediaTemple blows them all away so far in my experience. As MeanPC continues to grow, I will be placing a better strain on the gs resources. I’ll check back in to let you know how my GridServer experience is going then.